FBI Agent Who Failed To Vet Steele Dossier Is Named As One Who Helped Paint Hunter Biden Exploits As ‘Disinformation’

Beth WhiteheadJuly 26, 2022

An FBI agent involved in the Russia collusion hoax weaponized against former President Donald Trump is the same one now implicated by whistleblowers in using his position to discredit evidence related to Hunter Biden’s foreign entanglements right before the 2020 election, Chuck Ross with The Washington Free Beacon reports.

Ross notes that the whistleblowers who reached out to GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley about the FBI’s suppression of the Hunter Biden investigation identified intelligence analyst Brian Auten as the man responsible for constructing an FBI report in August 2020, which the whistleblowers say the FBI used as a “scheme … to undermine derogatory information connected to Hunter Biden by falsely suggesting it was disinformation.”

Grassley issued a letter last week to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray regarding the reports he had received from numerous whistleblowers that high-ranking members of the FBI had acted with partisan bias and politicized their investigations. “In light of these allegations,” Grassley wrote, “I remain very concerned that political bias by a select group of Justice Department and FBI officials has infected the Justice Department’s and FBI’s usual process and procedure to open and pursue high-profile and politically charged investigations.”

He continued to say that this intel would not come as any surprise to Garland and Wray as he and others had voiced their concerns about a 2019 FBI audit that showed significant violations of the FBI’s internal policies regarding the bureau’s most sensitive investigations. According to another letter from Grassley to Garland and Wray on Monday, similar violations occurred when the FBI ceased investigating Hunter Biden due to Auten’s report.

As Ross observes, Auten was deeply involved in Crossfire Hurricane, the counterintelligence investigation by the FBI into supposed Trump-Russia collusion. Auten, who was in charge of verifying the infamous Steele dossier that was part of the Russia hoax orchestrated by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, failed to flag its inconsistencies and allowed it to be treated as legitimate.

Ross notes that Auten was likely investigated by the FBI disciplinary office after an inspector general’s report revealed gross abuse of the FBI’s foreign surveillance process, since Wray testified in 2020 that all members mentioned in the report were referred to the disciplinary office. Auten nonetheless was assigned a role in the sham Hunter Biden investigation.

Ross further reports that Auten pressed for surveillance warrants for Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, pushing his colleagues in a Sept. 19, 2016 email to issue warrants to spy on Page based on information in the Steele dossier. The Department of Justice has since invalidated two of those surveillance warrants amid criticism of the FBI’s failure to verify the allegations used to grant them. Auten and his team also withheld vital information pertinent to the Trump/Russia probe, namely that the dossier’s author, Christopher Steele, said one of his sources was an “embellisher.”

Auten gave his report that led to the FBI ceasing investigation of Hunter Biden’s activities only two months before the New York Post published the content from Biden’s laptop, Ross adds, and some 50 or more former intelligence officials dismissed the laptop findings as Russian disinformation. Forensic analysis has since confirmed the emails are legitimate.

The FBI did not respond to Ross’s request for comment about Auten’s report or any disciplinary action against him.

Beth Whitehead is an intern at The Federalist and a journalism major at Patrick Henry College where she fondly excuses the excess amount of coffee she drinks as an occupational hazard.